14 The Language of Neoliberal

Education
An Interview with Henry Giroux
Mitja Sardoč

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholar-
ship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and
the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar Professorship in Critical Pedagogy. In
2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern
period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present as
part of Routledge’s Key Guides Publication Series. In 2007, he was named by
the Toronto Star as one of the “12 Canadians Changing the Way We Think.”
In 2005, he received an honorary doctorate from Memorial University in
Canada. He is on the editorial and advisory boards of numerous national and
international scholarly journals, and he has served as the editor or co-editor of
four scholarly book series. He co-edited a series on education and cultural
studies with Paulo Freire for a decade. He is a regular contributor to a number
of online journals including Truthout, Truthdig, and CounterPunch. He has
published in many journals including Social Text, Third Text, Cultural Studies,
Harvard Educational Review, Theory, Culture, & Society, and Monthly Review.
He is on the Board of Directors for Truthout. His books are translated into
many languages. His most recent books include: Neoliberalism’s War on Higher
Education (Haymarket 2014), The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights
2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge,
2015), America’s Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016), Amer-
ica at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017), The Public in Peril (Routledge,
2018), American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights,
2018), and The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019).
His primary research areas are: cultural studies, youth studies, critical pedagogy,
popular culture, media studies, social theory, and the politics of higher and
public education. He is particularly interested in what he calls the war on youth,
the corporatization of higher education, the politics of neoliberalism, the assault
on civic literacy and the collapse of public memory, public pedagogy, the edu-
cative nature of politics, and the rise of various youth movements across the
globe. His website can be found at www.henryagiroux.com.

For several decades now, neoliberalism has been at the forefront of discussions not
only in the economy and finance but has infiltrated our vocabulary in a number
224 Mitja Sardoč
of areas as diverse as governance studies, criminology, health care, jurisprudence,
education etc. What has triggered the use and application of this ‘economistic’
ideology associated with the promotion of effectiveness and efficiency?
Neoliberalism has become the dominant ideology of the times and has
established itself as a central feature of politics. Not only does it define itself as
a political and economic system whose aim was to consolidate power in the
hands of a corporate and financial elite, it also wages a war over ideas. In this
instance, it has defined itself as a form of common sense and functions as a
mode of public pedagogy that produces a template for structuring not just
markets but all of social life. In this sense, it has and continues to function not
only through public and higher education to produce and distribute market-
based values, identities, and modes of agency, but also in wider cultural appa-
ratuses and platforms to privatize, deregulate, economize, and subject all of the
commanding institutions and relations of everyday life to the dictates of priva-
tization, efficiency, deregulation, and commodification.
Since the 1970s as more and more of the commanding institutions of
society come under the control of neoliberal ideology, its notions of common
sense – an unchecked individualism, harsh competition, an aggressive attack on
the welfare state, the evisceration of public goods, and its attack on all models
of sociality at odds with market values – have become the reigning hegemony
of capitalist societies. What many on the left have failed to realize is that neo-
liberalism is about more than economic structures, it is also is a powerful ped-
agogical force – especially in the era of social media – that engages in full-
spectrum dominance at every level of civil society. Its reach extends not only
into education but also among an array of digital platforms as well as in the
broader sphere of popular culture. Under neoliberal modes of governance,
regardless of the institution, every social relation is reduced to an act of com-
merce. Neoliberalism’s promotion of effectiveness and efficiency gives credence
to its willingness and success in making education central to politics. It also
offers a warning to progressives, as Pierre Bourdieu has insisted that the left has
underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have
not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front.

According to the advocates of neoliberalism, education represents one of the main

indicators of future economic growth and individual well-being. How – and why –
has education became one of the central elements of the ‘neoliberal revolution’?
Advocates of neoliberalism have always recognized that education is a site of
struggle over which there are very high stakes regarding how young people are
educated, who is to be educated, and what vision of the present and future
should be most valued and privileged. Higher education in the sixties went
through a revolutionary period in the United States and many other countries
as students sought to both redefine education as a democratic public sphere
and to open it up to a variety of groups that up to that point had been exclu-
ded. Conservatives were extremely frightened over this shift and did everything
they could to counter it. Evidence of this is clear in the production of the
 An Interview with Henry Giroux 225
Powell Memo published in 1971 and later in The Trilateral Commission’s
book-length report, namely, The Crisis of Democracy, published in 1975. From
the 1960s on, the conservatives, especially the neoliberal right, have waged a
war on education in order to rid it of its potential role as a democratic public
sphere. At the same time, they sought aggressively to restructure its modes of
governance, undercut the power of faculty, privilege knowledge that was
instrumental to the market, define students mainly as clients and consumers,
and reduce the function of higher education largely to training students for the
global workforce. At the core of the neoliberal investment in education is a
desire to undermine the university’s commitment to the truth, critical thinking,
and its obligation to stand for justice and assume responsibility for safe-
guarding the interests of young people as they enter a world marked with
massive inequalities, exclusion, and violence at home and abroad. Higher
education may be one of the few institutions left in neoliberal societies that
offers a protective space to question, challenge, and think against the grain.
Neoliberalism considers such a space to be dangerous and they have done
everything possible to eliminate higher education as a space where students can
realize themselves as critical citizens, faculty can participate in the governing
structure, and education can define itself as a right rather than as a privilege.

Almost by definition, reforms and other initiatives aimed to improve educational

practice have been one of the pivotal mechanisms to infiltrate the neoliberal
agenda of effectiveness and efficiency. What aspect of neoliberalism and its edu-
cational agenda do you find most problematic? Why?
Increasingly aligned with market forces, higher education is mostly primed
for teaching business principles and corporate values, while university adminis-
trators are prized as CEOs or bureaucrats in a neoliberal-based audit culture.
Many colleges and universities have been McDonalds-ized as knowledge is
increasingly viewed as a commodity resulting in curricula that resemble a fast-
food menu. In addition, faculty are subjected increasingly to a Wal-Mart model
of labor relations designed as Noam Chomsky points out “to reduce labor
costs and to increase labor servility.” In the age of precarity and flexibility, the
majority of faculty have been reduced to part-time positions, subjected to low
wages, lost control over the conditions of their labor, suffered reduced bene-
fits, and been frightened about addressing social issues critically in their class-
rooms for fear of losing their jobs. The latter may be the central issue curbing
free speech and academic freedom in the academy. Moreover, many of these
faculty are barely able to make ends meet because of their impoverished sal-
aries, and some are on food stamps. If faculty are treated like service workers,
students fare no better and are now relegated to the status of customers and
clients. Moreover, they are not only inundated with the competitive, priva-
tized, and market-driven values of neoliberalism, they are also punished by
those values in the form of exorbitant tuition rates, astronomical debts owed to
banks and other financial institutions, and in too many cases a lack of mean-
ingful employment. As a project and movement, neoliberalism undermines the
226 Mitja Sardoč
ability of educators and others to create the conditions that give students the
opportunity to acquire the knowledge and the civic courage necessary to make
desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. As an ideology,
neoliberalism is at odds with any viable notion of democracy which it sees as
the enemy of the market. Yet, Democracy cannot work if citizens are not
autonomous, self-judging, curious, reflective, and independent – qualities that
are indispensable for students if they are going to make vital judgments and
choices about participating in and shaping decisions that affect everyday life,
institutional reform, and governmental policy.

Why are large-scale assessments and quantitative data in general a central part
of the ‘neo-liberal toolkit’ in educational research?
These are the tools of accountants and have nothing to do with larger
visions or questions about what matters as part of a university education. The
overreliance on metrics and measurement has become a tool used to remove
questions of responsibility, morality, and justice from the language and policies
of education. I believe the neoliberal toolkit as you put it is part of the dis-
course of civic illiteracy that now runs rampant in higher educational research,
a kind of mind-numbing investment in a metric-based culture that kills the
imagination and wages an assault on what it means to be critical, thoughtful,
daring, and willing to take risks. Metrics in the service of an audit culture has
become the new face of a culture of positivism, a kind of empirical-based
panopticon that turns ideas into numbers and the creative impulse into ashes.
Large-scale assessments and quantitative data are the driving mechanisms in
which everything is absorbed into the culture of business. The distinction
between information and knowledge has become irrelevant in this model and
anything that cannot be captured by numbers is treated with disdain. In this
new audit panopticon, the only knowledge that matters is that which can be
measured. What is missed here, of course, is that measurable utility is a curse as
a universal principle because it ignores any form of knowledge based on the
assumption that individuals need to know more than how things work or what
their practical utility might be. This is a language that cannot answer the
question of what the responsibility of the university and educators might be in
a time of tyranny, in the face of the unspeakable, and the current widespread
attack on immigrants, Muslims, and others considered disposable. This is a
language that is both afraid and unwilling to imagine what alternative worlds
inspired by the search for equality and justice might be possible in an age beset
by the increasing dark forces of authoritarianism.

While the analysis of the neoliberal agenda in education is well documented, the
analysis of the language of neoliberal education is at the fringes of scholarly
interest. In particular, the expansion of the neoliberal vocabulary with egalitar-
ian ideas such as fairness, justice, equality of opportunity, well-being etc. has
received [at best] only limited attention. What factors have contributed to this
shift of emphasis?
 An Interview with Henry Giroux 227
Neoliberalism has upended how language is used in both education and the
wider society. It works to appropriate discourses associated with liberal
democracy that have become normalized in order to both limit their meanings
and use them to mean the opposite of what they have meant traditionally,
especially with respect to human rights, justice, informed judgment, critical
agency, and democracy itself. It is waging a war over not just the relationship
between economic structures but over memory, words, meaning, and politics.
Neoliberalism takes words like freedom and limits it to the freedom to con-
sume, spew out hate, and celebrate notions of self-interest and a rabid indivi-
dualism as the new common sense. Equality of opportunity means engaging in
ruthless forms of competition, a war of all against all ethos, and a survival of
the fittest mode of behavior. The vocabulary of neoliberalism operates in the
service of violence in that it reduces the capacity for human fulfillment in the
collective sense, diminishes a broad understanding of freedom as fundamental
to expanding the capacity for human agency, and diminishes the ethical ima-
gination by reducing it to the interest of the market and the accumulation of
capital. Words, memory, language and meaning are weaponized under neoli-
beralism. Certainly, neither the media nor progressives have given enough
attention to how neoliberalism colonizes language because neither group has
given enough attention to viewing the crisis of neoliberalism as not only an
economic crisis but also a crisis of ideas. Education is not viewed as a force
central to politics and as such the intersection of language, power, and politics
in the neoliberal paradigm has been largely ignored. Moreover, at a time when
civic culture is being eradicated, public spheres are vanishing, and notions of
shared citizenship appear obsolete, words that speak to the truth, reveal injus-
tices, and provide informed critical analysis also begin to disappear. This makes
it all the more difficult to engage critically the use of neoliberalism’s coloniza-
tion of language. In the United States, Trump’s prodigious tweets signify not
only a time in which governments engage in the pathology of endless fabrica-
tions, but also how they function to reinforce a pedagogy of infantilism
designed to animate his base in a glut of shock while reinforcing a culture of
war, fear, divisiveness, and greed in ways that disempower his critics.

You have written extensively on neoliberalism’s exclusively instrumental view of

education, its reductionist understanding of effectiveness, and its distorted image
of fairness. In what way should radical pedagogy fight back against neoliberalism
and its educational agenda?
First, higher education needs to reassert its mission as a public good in order
to reclaim its egalitarian and democratic impulses. Educators need to initiate
and expand a national conversation in which higher education can be defended
as a democratic public sphere and the classroom as a site of deliberative
inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking, a site that makes a claim on the radical
imagination and a sense of civic courage. At the same time, the discourse on
defining higher education as a democratic public sphere can provide the plat-
form for a more expressive commitment in developing a social movement in
228 Mitja Sardoč
defense of public goods and against neoliberalism as a threat to democracy.
This also means rethinking how education can be funded as a public good and
what it might mean to fight for policies that both stop the defunding of edu-
cation and fight to relocate funds from the death dealing military and incar-
ceration budgets to those supporting education at all levels of society. The
challenge here is for higher education not to abandon its commitment to
democracy and to recognize that neoliberalism operates in the service of the
forces of economic domination and ideological repression. Second, educators
need to acknowledge and make good on the claim that a critically literate
citizen is indispensable to a democracy, especially at a time when higher edu-
cation is being privatized and subject to neoliberal restructuring efforts. This
suggests placing ethics, civic literacy, social responsibility, and compassion at
the forefront of learning so as to combine knowledge, teaching, and research
with the rudiments of what might be called the grammar of an ethical and
social imagination. This would imply taking seriously those values, traditions,
histories, and pedagogies that would promote a sense of dignity, self-reflection,
and compassion at the heart of a real democracy. Third, higher education
needs to be viewed as a right, as it is in many countries such as Germany,
France, Norway, Finland, and Brazil, rather than a privilege for a limited few,
as it is in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Fourth, in a
world driven by data, metrics, and the replacement of knowledge by the over-
abundance of information, educators need to enable students to engage in
multiple literacies extending from print and visual culture to digital culture.
They need to become border crossers who can think dialectically, and learn not
only how to consume culture but also to produce it. Fifth, faculty must reclaim
their right to control over the nature of their labor, shape policies of govern-
ance, and be given tenure track lines with the guarantee of secure employment
and protection for academic freedom and free speech.

Why is it important to analyze the relationship between neoliberalism and civic

literacy particularly as an educational project?
The ascendancy of neoliberalism in American politics has made visible a
plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt
for reason that has been decades in the making. It also points to the withering
of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life and
the erosion of any sense of shared citizenship. As market mentalities and mor-
alities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and
public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these
institutions vanish – from public schools and alternative media to health care
centers– there is also a serious erosion of the discourse of community, justice,
equality, public values, and the common good. At the same time reason and
truth are not simply contested, or the subject of informed arguments as they
should be, but wrongly vilified – banished to Trump’s poisonous world of fake
news. For instance, under the Trump administration, language has been pil-
laged, truth and reason disparaged, and words and phrases emptied of any
 An Interview with Henry Giroux 229
substance or turned into their opposite, all via the endless production of
Trump’s Twitter storms and the ongoing clown spectacle of Fox News. This
grim reality points to a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political
will, and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any
democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of education as a public
good. What we are witnessing under neoliberalism is not simply a political
project to consolidate power in the hands of the corporate and financial elite
but also a reworking of the very meaning of literacy and education as crucial to
what it means to create an informed citizenry and democratic society. In an
age when literacy and thinking become dangerous to the anti-democratic
forces governing all the commanding economic and cultural institutions of the
United States, truth is viewed as a liability, ignorance becomes a virtue, and
informed judgments and critical thinking demeaned and turned into rubble
and ashes. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of alleged common
sense, literacy is regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science
is confused with pseudo-science. Traces of critical thought appear more and
more at the margins of the culture as ignorance becomes the primary orga-
nizing principle of American society.
Under the forty-year reign of neoliberalism, language has been militarized,
handed over to advertisers, game show idiocy, and a political and culturally
embarrassing anti-intellectualism sanctioned by the White House. Couple this
with a celebrity culture that produces an ecosystem of babble, shock, and
tawdry entertainment. Add on the cruel and clownish anti-public intellectuals
who defend inequality, infantile forms of masculinity, and define ignorance and
a warrior mentality as part of the natural order, all the while dethroning any
viable sense of agency and the political.
The culture of manufactured illiteracy is also reproduced through a media
apparatus that trades in illusions and the spectacle of violence. Under these
circumstances, illiteracy becomes the norm and education becomes central to a
version of neoliberal zombie politics that functions largely to remove demo-
cratic values, social relations, and compassion from the ideology, policies, and
commanding institutions that now control American society. In the age of
manufactured illiteracy, there is more at work than simply an absence of
learning, ideas, or knowledge. Nor can the reign of manufactured illiteracy be
solely attributed to the rise of the new social media, a culture of immediacy,
and a society that thrives on instant gratification. On the contrary, manu-
factured illiteracy is political and educational project central to a right-wing
corporatist ideology and set of policies that work aggressively to depoliticize
people and make them complicitous with the neoliberal and racist political and
economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives. There is
more at work here than what Ariel Dorfman calls a “felonious stupidity,” there
is also the workings of a deeply malicious form of 21st century neoliberal fas-
cism and a culture of cruelty in which language is forced into the service of
violence while waging a relentless attack on the ethical imagination and the
notion of the common good. In the current historical moment illiteracy and
230 Mitja Sardoč
ignorance offer the pretense of a community in doing so has undermined the
importance of civic literacy both in higher education and the larger society.

Is there any shortcoming in the analysis of such a complex (and controversial)

social phenomenon as neoliberalism and its educational agenda? Put differently:
is there any aspect of the neoliberal educational agenda that its critics have failed
to address?
Any analysis of an ideology such as neoliberalism will always be incomplete.
And the literature on neoliberalism in its different forms and diverse contexts is
quite abundant. What is often underplayed in my mind are three things. First,
too little is said about how neoliberalism functions not simply as an economic
model for finance capital but as a public pedagogy that operates through a
diverse number of sites and platforms. Second, not enough has been written
about its war on a democratic notion of sociality and the concept of the social.
Third, at a time in which echoes of a past fascism are on the rise not enough is
being said about the relationship between neoliberalism and fascism, or what I
call neoliberal fascism, especially the relationship between the widespread suf-
fering and misery caused by neoliberalism and the rise of white supremacy. I
define neoliberal fascism as both a project and a movement, which functions as
an enabling force that weakens, if not destroys, the commanding institutions of
a democracy while undermining its most valuable principles. Consequently, it
provides a fertile ground for the unleashing of the ideological architecture,
poisonous values, and racist social relations sanctioned and produced under
fascism. Neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and
mutually compatible project and movement that connects the worse excesses
of capitalism with fascist ideals – the veneration of war, a hatred of reason and
truth; a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity; the sup-
pression of freedom and dissent; a culture which promotes lies, spectacles, a
demonization of the other, a discourse of decline, brutal violence, and ulti-
mately state violence in heterogeneous forms. As a project, it destroys all the
commanding institutions of democracy and consolidates power in the hands of
a financial elite. As a movement, it produces and legitimates massive economic
inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles essential govern-
ment agencies, and individualizes all social problems. In addition, it transforms
the political state into the corporate state, and uses the tools of surveillance,
militarization, and law and order to discredit the critical press and media,
undermine civil liberties while ridiculing and censoring critics. What critics
need to address is that neoliberalism is the face of a new fascism and as such it
speaks to the need to repudiate the notion that capitalism and democracy are
the same thing, renew faith in the promises of a democratic socialism, create
new political formations around an alliance of diverse social movements, and
take seriously the need to make education central to politics itself.